Top 5 Cloud and Networking Announcements From Cisco Live 2024
By Chuck Day, Strategic Alliances Manager
This year’s Cisco Live was full of interesting insights and discussions. Here are the five you should know about.
Amidst the dazzle of Las Vegas, Cisco Live 2024 was a whirlwind of innovation, technology, and camaraderie. Held from June 2-6, this year’s event hosted over 20,000 in-person attendees and nearly one million online viewers, numbers anyone would call a massive success.
I was proud to attend on behalf of Megaport as this event was particularly special for us – we got to engage with more people than ever before. I appreciated the quality of our interactions, learning, and partnerships fostered over the five days.
Getting to be in the presence of legends like Elton John, Tom Brady, and Oscar Piastri was a nice bonus, and only underscored the magnitude of the event.
Cisco Live has consistently been a pinnacle of discovery for attendees, and this year was exceptionally so. Here are the five cloud and networking announcements and insights from Cisco Live 2024 that I think are particularly compelling.
1. Networking teams need to be ready for big (big) data
While not so much an announcement, there was a particular focus on the vast ocean of data we’re all swimming in – the attempt to gain visibility into hundreds of billions of data points daily via a billion endpoints. This monumental task encapsulates not just seeing this data but understanding, securing, and managing it efficiently.
Among the titanic statistics shared, what grabbed my attention was Splunk’s impressive capability to ingest over 4PB of data per day (shared in an excellent keynote from Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins).
This deserves a mention because we’re dealing with larger volumes of information than we can comprehend, and the rhetoric from these discussions is clear: We are in the era of big data analytics on steroids.
Our biggest challenge is figuring out how to process it all so it serves us, rather than slows us down. Networking and IT teams will do well to explore ways to unify and consolidate network connections, service providers, and edge points across their business, to avoid tsunamis of data causing operational headaches in the near future.
2. $1 billion global AI investment fund
You’ll notice a theme across these insights – AI is powering all sorts of innovations in the networking world (including some innovations of our own). At no point was this more obvious than when Cisco announced a staggering $1 billion investment into a Global AI Investment Fund.
This fund aims to propel advancements that connect and protect organizations in an AI-powered world, and shows their firm belief in the transformative power AI is delivering to our industry.
Cisco’s aim to simplify adoption and provide extensive visibility and insights across digital footprints via AI is game-changing. For networking and IT professionals, it means evolving from manual, time-consuming analytics and diagnostics to real-time, AI-driven insights and actions.
As IT and networking professionals, this announcement represents a shift toward more intelligent, self-optimizing networks that can significantly reduce operational overheads and increase efficiency.
This is how I love to see AI used – the benefits to businesses will be enormous.
Here’s how generative AI is already changing the way we harness our data.
3. Unified Observability Experience with Splunk
Addressing the challenge of siloed data and infrastructure, Cisco’s announcement of a Unified Observability Experience package in collaboration with Splunk is a significant step towards holistic network management. This partnership aims to bridge the gap between customer-owned and un-owned infrastructures, providing a seamless, integrated view of an organization’s entire digital estate.
They also announced new full-stack observability innovations, including a new AI Assistant for AppDynamics, which gives users insights to make informed and accurate decisions incredibly quickly.
For professionals tasked with managing complex networks, this offers a beacon of hope for simplified, unified networking visibility and control, even as networks continue to grow.
4. Cisco Nexus HyperFabric with NVIDIA
A new AI deployment solution, Cisco Nexus HyperFabric in collaboration with NVIDIA, is a revolutionary leap toward streamlined AI integrations within network infrastructures.
It empowers IT and network professionals to design, deploy, and monitor AI pods from a single, unified platform, without the need for extensive IT knowledge and skills. The result – customers will far more easily be able to deploy, manage, and monitor their data centers, colocation facilities, and edge sites.
The integration with NVIDIA’s cutting-edge AI technologies promises not just an enhancement of network capabilities, but a transformation in how networks are designed and operated with AI functionalities at the core.
5. Enhanced partnership between Megaport and Cisco
For me personally, and for Megaport, our reaffirmed and growing partnership with Cisco was a highlight of Cisco Live 2024. We’re the only global, data-center agnostic Network as a Service provider on the Cisco Global Price List, and you can provision Cisco with Megaport via a pay-as-you-go, single-vendor consumption model.
The current benefits we provide networking customers, coupled with the innovations both Cisco and Megaport are making across our solutions suites, sets the stage for us to keep leading the digital landscape forward. I’m excited to see all the amazing ways our customers keep using our flexible platform to propel them forward as they grow.
Agile, simple, and powerful – learn more about networking with Cisco and Megaport.
My final thoughts
Cisco Live 2024 has undoubtedly set a new benchmark for what’s on the horizon in networking and cloud technologies.
It’s not just about the advancements in technology but also about the collaborative spirit in our industry to elevate, secure, and simplify how networks operate in the digital age. There’s a clear focus on bringing everything together through partnerships, AI, and smarter networking features.
After digesting these announcements I can’t help but feel excitement at how promising the future looks right now, filled with opportunities to innovate and reshape the landscape of cloud networking.
